thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Words have
suddenly become sterile for me…..significantly, perhaps, after a series of
posts about the writing on public administration…..and an earlier series this
year on
the global crisis.

Strangely, contemplation
of such complexities doesn’t seem to bring either understanding or resolution -
but rather a world-weariness….Activism is more exciting – but its closed focus,
lack of cooperation and proper links to the world of rational analysis are but several
deficiencies which always seems to bring it down.

Are we
therefore forced to choose between technocratic rationality on the one hand…
and strident activism on the other?

What other
ways are there to pass the “autumn of one’s days”??? Music? Family and
Friendship? Wine?

I had
imagined that composing an open (and extended) letter to my daughters with
reflections about the understandings I feel I’ve developed since 2000 might
have wider interest…..simply because I consider myself a typical baby-boomer -
if one with wider inter-disciplinary and nomadic experiences than
normal…..Hence the draft Dispatches to the
post-capitalist generation. I had always regretted that my father (and a
couple of other father figures) had not left me with such reflections……

But the
present draft is no more than a pseudo-intellectual’s reading notes….a modern
commonplace book. It doesn’t move the soul….

The one
“issue” that has tempted me into a post this past month has been the ongoing
Brexit saga in Britain (Ireland and Gibraltar) but that very fact reminds me of
a quotation from a great book Breakdown
of Nations;by Leopold Kohr which I read some years back -

the chief blessing of a small-state system is
...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is
pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual
miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an
ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the
task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract
issue...The blessing of a small state returns us from the
misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of
meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and
neighbourhoods

I hope still
to write soon about Brexit – since it is something currently devouring and
destroying a nation I once belonged to……

But if I
cannot, at the moment, easily write or read about “issues”, I find that I can
still devour material about individuals……and was very taken this morning with a
book about 28 people who clearly had “made a difference” ….eg to someone who
had the grace to write about the contribution she felt these people had made
not only to her own profession but to the world - Intellectual
Shamans – management academics making a difference; by Sandra Waddock
(2015). Such books – which profile key figures in intellectual disciplines –
are quite rare but always worthwhile (available also, to my knowledge, for
political scientists; development economists; and sociologists).

I know only
4 of the 28 figures included in the book - Henry Mintzberg, Robert Quinn, Ed Schein
and Otto Scharmer - but all seem to have this “inner light” which allows them to
inspire an alternative vision. More excerpts
from the book are available here

I came
across the book thanks to a post by the author in this month’s Great Transition Initiative (GTI) .
Waddock’s article on “large
systems change” is also well worth a read…..It's one of many articles you can read in the interesting Journal of Corporate Citizenship - most of whose content can be accessed freely.It may not be an emotional response we need these days but it is certainly something more than ratiocination - more on the spiritual/humanistic dimension?

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Thanks to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, I found myself this morning enjoying the company
of dead men… specifically George Orwell and Andre Gide.

Her website is a superb personal endeavour which
offers extended excerpts from classic texts about the writing and creativity
process – and also striking illustrations. In all the noise and hubbub that
passes for civilisation, her site is a haven of tranquillity.

I don’t know why the novels of Andre Gide (1869-1951) appealed to
me when I first read them (in French) in the 1960s. He certainly lived life to
the full and was well-travelled - and must have written clear, taut French to
make an appeal to me in the original. He was a great diarist and, reading, for
the first time this morning, the volume of his journals
starting (in Turkey) in 1914 made a powerful impression on me.

George Orwell is an even older friend whose Politics and the English
Language
ranks with the best of Shakespeare in its humanism and wisdom. The article
lists the most prevalent of the “bad habits” responsible for what he argued (in
1946) was the “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” poisoning the
English language:

- Dying metaphors: A newly invented metaphor assists thought
by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is
technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being
an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in
between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have
lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the
trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

Examples are: Ring the
changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand
shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to
the mill, fishing in troubled waters, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed.

Verbal
false limbs: These
save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same
time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of
symmetry.

Instead of being a single
word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes
a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some
general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In
addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active,
and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination
of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut
down by means of the -ize and de-formations, and banal
statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not
un- formation.

Simple conjunctions and
prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, the fact
that, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the
ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such refunding commonplaces
as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to
be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to
a satisfactory conclusion, etc.

Adjectives like epoch-making,
epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, inevitable, inexorable,
veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international
politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on anarchaic
color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, trident,
sword, shield, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions
such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, status quo,
gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and
elegance.

Except for the useful
abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need
for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers,
and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always
haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,
and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous,
clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from
their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.

The jargon peculiar to Marxist
writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackeys, flunkey, mad
dog. White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated
from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to
use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary,
the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this
kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital,
non-fragmentatory) than to think up the English words that will cover
one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and
vagueness.

Meaningless
words: In certain kinds of writing, particularly in
art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages
which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic,
plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in
art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not
point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the
reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its
living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about
Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple
difference of opinion.

If words
like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon
words dead and living, he would see at once that language
was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused.
The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies
“something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom,
patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Orwell’s
most important point, however, is a vivid testament to what modern psychology
now knows about metaphorical thinking. By using
stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost
of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This
is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call
up a visual image. When these images clash … it can be taken as certain that
the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other
words he is not really thinking.

Orwell
concludes with a practical checklist of strategies for avoiding such mindless
momentum of thought and the stale writing it produces:

A scrupulous writer, in
every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:What am I trying to say?What words will express it?What image or idiom will
make it clearer?Is this image fresh enough
to have an effect?

And he will probably ask
himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is
avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can
shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready made phrases
come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your
thoughts for you, to certain extent — and at need they will perform the
important service of partially concealing your meaning even yourself.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

The
language of these books and articles about public management is utterly
soul-destroying! The series of posts I’ve just done required me to pull out and
flick through more than a hundred books in my libraries (real and virtual) -
and I had assumed that the next stage would be some selective, in-depth reading
– to extract some nuggets.

But
the baroque language and dead imagery of the books – even the best of them -
have my eyes (and very soul) glazing over.

The
book starts well with a strong critique of the alienating nature of so much
work in large organisations and a question about why it has so be so, It then
suggests that our collective history is not unlike that of our own personal growth,
with key points of our development when we became more aware of our
relationships with others….Laloux leans apparently for his approach on what is known
as “integral theory” - associated with someone called Ken Wilbur. The book suggests that organisations, until
now, can be classified into four types - Red, Amber, Orange and Green – with the
guiding metaphors for these types (p 36 of the book) being “wolf pack”, “army”,
“machine” and “family”. Reminds me of the four “Gods of management” of Charles
Handy and Roger Harrison – who are, however, not credited,

The
core of the book consists of his attempt to find organisations which had broken
out of the limits of this typology and were giving both customers and staff satisfaction. Twelve
organisations are identified and their history structure and processes
detailed. They are both profit and non-profit but have one basic feature in
common – they are all managed by the
workforce with senior executives (such as are left in a streamlined
structure) playing essentially a coaching role…..The most famous of these is
probably the Dutch nursing cooperative Buurtzorg

There’s
a lot of thought-provoking material in the book which, after an initial splash
3 years ago, has not been much heard of – despite it being the first management
book or a long time to focus on worker control (in a totally non-ideological way). Perhaps he offended too many people? First the theorists – for attributing
so little to them. And, secondly, the ideologues – who would have preferred
some slogans…..

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Readers
will have noticed my growing impatience with the academic output about public services in the past 30-40 years. About the only writer I
exempted was Chris Pollitt whose The Essential Public Manager (2003) is, by
far and away, the best book to help the intelligent citizen make sense of this
field. It’s friendly; brings in individuals to play roles illustrating
contemporary debates; clearly summarises different schools of thought on the key
issues; and leaves the reader with guidance for further reading….

Most
authors in this field, however, are writing for other academics (to impress
them), for students (to give them copy for passing exams); or for potential
customers in senior government positions (to persuade them to offer contracts)
– they are never writing for citizens. As a result, they develop some very bad
habits in writing – which is why
this new book should be in their family’s Xmas stocking this year. It
offers priceless advice, including -

1." Bait the hook“ When
you go fishing, you bait the hook with what the fish likes, not with what you
like.” An obvious principle, easily lost sight of. Putting yourself in the audience’s shoes governs everything from the
shape of your argument to the choice of vocabulary. Ask what they do and don’t
know about the subject, and what they need to; not what you know about it.Ask
what they are likely to find funny, rather than what you do. What are the
shared references that will bring them on board? Where do you need to pitch
your language? How much attention are they likely to be paying?

This
is what Aristotle, talking about rhetoric, called ethos, or the question of how
your audience sees you. And the best way for them to see you is either as one
of them, or someone on their side. As the speech theorist Kenneth Burke wrote –
another line I never tire of quoting – “You persuade a man only insofar as you
can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude,
identifying your ways with his.”

2. Be clear A
lot of style guides, with good reason, tell their readers to write Plain
English. There’s even a Plain
English Campaign that does its nut, year-round and vocationally, about
examples of baffling officialese, pompous lawyer-speak and soul-shrivelling
business jargon.Plain
English (the simplest word that does the job; straightforward sentences; nice
active verbs etc) is far from the only style you should have at your command.
But if you depart from it, you should have a reason, be it aesthetic or
professional.

The plainer the language, the easier the reader finds it; and the
easier the reader finds it, the more likely they’ll take in what you’re saying
and continue reading. Surveys of the average reading age of British adults
routinely put it between nine and 13. Trim your style accordingly.Steven Pinker talks
about “classic style” (he borrows the notion from the literary critics
Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner). This, as he sees it, is a variation on
Plain English that compliments the reader’s intelligence and talks to him or
her as an equal.

He gives a cute example. “The early bird gets the worm” is
plain style, he says. “The second mouse gets the cheese” is classic. I half-buy
the distinction; though much of what Pinker credits to the classic style is
exactly what’s asked of any good instance of the plain. And the examples he
offers convey quite different thoughts, and (a bit unfairly) attribute a cliche
to the plain style and a good joke to the classic.

3. Prefer right-branching
sentences Standard-issue
sentences, in English, have subject-verb-object order: dog (subject) bites
(verb) man (object). There are any number of elaborations on this, but the
spine of your sentence, no matter how many limbs it grows, consists of those
three things.

If
you have a huge series of modifying clauses before you reach the subject of the
sentence, the reader’s brain is working harder; likewise, if you have a vast
parenthesis between subject and verb or even verb and object. The reader’s
brain has registered the subject (dog) and it is waiting for a verb so it can
make sense of the sentence. Meanwhile, you’re distracting it by cramming ever
more material into its working memory. “My
dog, which I got last week because I’ve always wanted a dog and I heard from
Fred – you know, Fred who works in the chip shop and had that injury last year
three days after coming home from his holidays – that he was getting rid of his
because his hours had changed and he couldn’t walk it as much as it wanted
(very thoughtful, is Fred), bit me ...”

4. Read it aloud Reading
something aloud is a good way of stress-testing it: you’ll notice very abruptly
if your sentences are tangled up: that overfilling-the-working-memory thing can
be heard in your voice. The American speechwriter Peggy Noonan advises that
once you have a draft, “Stand up and speak it aloud. Where you falter, alter.”

I
was about to write to Chris Pollitt to encourage him to produce a new edition
of his book (which is 14 years old) but, magically, came across The
Twenty First Century Public Manager - –
a rare book which, like Pollitt’s, looks at the complex world facing an
individual public manager these days and the skills and outlook they need to
help it survive.

I
can’t say I’m greatly convinced that all the “sound and fury” has produced
anything all that substantial…but, if I can keep my eyes open long enough, I
will go back to the 2011 book by Benington and Moore (which does include
chapters by interesting characters such as Colin Crouch and Gerry Stoker) and
let my readers know…..

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

As
I suspected, I’m still worrying away at some of the issues raised by the series
of posts about the massive changes to our public services in recent decades –
and how they have been covered in “the literature”. I realize that I left out
an important strand of thinking – and that the series leaves the impression of
inevitability….

The
last post paid tribute to some of the people who, in the 1960s, most clearly articulated
the demand for a major shake-up of Britain’s public institutions – the
“modernization” agenda which initially brought us huge local authorities and merged
Ministries with well-paid managers operating with performance targets.

Scale
and management were key words – and I readily confess to being one of the
cheerleaders for this. The small municipalities I knew were “parochial” and
lacked any strategic sense but – of course – they could easily have developed
it……

Were the changes
inevitable?

I
have a feeling that quite a few of the early voices who argued for “reform” might
now have major reservations about where their institutional critique has taken
us all – although it was a global discontent which was being channeled in those
days…..

However
not all voices sang from the same hymn sheet……The main complaint may then have been that of “amateurism” but it was
by no means accepted that “managerialism” was the answer.

1968,
after all, had been an expression of people power. And the writings of Paolo
Freire and Ivan Illich – let alone British activists Colin Ward and Tony
Gibson; and sociologists such as Jon Davies and Norman Dennis – were, in the
70s, celebrating citizen voices against bureaucratic power.

The
therapist Carl Rogers was at the height of his
global influence. And voices such as Alain Touraine’s were also
giving hope in France…..

The managerialism which
started to infect the public sector from the 70s expressed hierarchical values
which sat badly with the egalitarian spirit which had been released the
previous decade….

But, somehow,
all that energy and optimism seemed to evaporate fairly quickly – certainly in
the British “winter of discontent” and Thatcher rule of the 80s. What started
as a simple expression of the need for some (private) “managerial discipline”
in the public sector was quickly absorbed into a wider and more malevolent
agenda of privatization and contracting out…..And, somehow, in the UK at any
rate, progressive forces just rolled over….
Our constitutional system, as Lord Hailsham once starkly put it, is an
“elective dictatorship”.

The
core European systems were, however, different – with legal and constitutional
safeguards, PR systems and coalition governments – although the EC technocracy
has been chipping away at much of this.

Just
why and how the British adopted what came to be called New Public Management is
a story which is usually told in a fatalistic way – as if there were no human
agency involved. The story
is superbly told here - as the fatal combination of Ministerial frustration
with civil service “dynamic conservatism” with a theory (enshrined in Public
Choice economics) for that inertia…. A politico-organisational problem was
redefined as an economic one and, heh presto, NPM went global

In
the approach to the New Labour victory of 1997, there was a brief period when
elements of the party seemed to remember that centralist “Morrisonian”
bureaucracy had not been the only option – that British socialism
had in the 1930s been open to things such as cooperatives and “guild socialism”.
For just a year or so there was (thanks to people such as Paul
Hirst and Will Hutton)
talk of “stakeholding”.
But the bitter memories of the party infighting in the early 80s over the
left-wing’s alternative economic strategy were perhaps too close to make
that a serious option – and the window quickly closed…..Thatcher’s spirit of
“dog eat dog” lived on – despite the talk of “Joined Up Government” (JUG), words
like “trust” and “cooperation” were
suspect to New Labour ears.

Holistic
Governance made a brief appearance at the start of the New Labour reign in
1997 but was quickly shown the door a few years later.…

“What if?,,,,,”

The
trouble with the massive literature on public management reform (which touches
the separate literatures of political science, public administration,
development, organizational sociology, management….even philosophy) is that it
is so compllcated that only a handful of experts can hope to understand it all
– and few of them can or want to explain it to us in simple terms.

I’ve
hinted in this post at what I regard as a couple of junctures when it might
have been possible to stop the momentum….I know the notion of counterfactual
history is treated with some disdain but the victors do sometimes lose and
we ignore the discussion about “junctures” at our peril.

The
UNDP recently published a
good summary of what it called the three types of public management we have
seen in the past half century. There are different ways of describing the final
column but this one gives a sense of how we have been moving..

Thursday, October 12, 2017

For
the past 3 weeks I’ve been trying to compress the thoughts I (and many others!!)
have had over the past few decades about administrative reform into a table
whose columns list core questions; narratives; and key texts …..

It
was all sparked off by the book published earlier this year on Dismembering
(the State) – although the subject has been a lot in my thoughts this year

There
may now be hundreds of thousands of academics and consultants in this field
but, when I started to challenge the local bureaucracy in Scotland in the late
60s there were, astonishingly, only a handful of people challenging public bureaucracies – basically in the UK and the US.

In
the US they were following (or part of) Johnston’s Anti-Poverty programmes and
included people such as Peter Marris and Martin Rein whose Dilemmas
of Social Reform (1967) was one of the first narratives to make an impact
on me. In the UK it was those associated with the 1964-66 Fulton Royal
Commission on the Civil Service; with the Redcliffe-Maud and Wheatley Royal
Commissions on Local Government; and. those such as Kay Carmichael who, as a
member of the Kilbrandon Committee, was the inspiration for the Scottish Social
Work system set up in 1969.

In
the 70s, people like John Stewart of INLOGOV inspired a new vision of local
government…my ex-tutor John MacIntosh focused on devolution; even the
conservative politician Michael Heseltine had a vision of a new metropolitan
politics…..

It
was people like this that set the ball of organizational change rolling in the
public sector…. tracked by such British academics as Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt
and Rod Rhodes – and who have supplied a living first for thousands of
European academics who started to follow the various reforms of the 1970s in
the civil service and local government; and then the privatization and
agencification of the 1980s. Consultants then got on the bandwagon when british
administrative reform took off globally in the 1990s.

Working
on the tables incorporated in the past few posts has involved a lot of googling
- and shuffling of books from the shelves of my glorious oak bookcase here in
the mountains to the generous oak table which looks out on the snow which now
caps those mountains……

Hundreds
of books on public management reform (if you count the virtual ones in the
library) – but, for me, there are only a handful of names whose writing makes
the effort worthwhile. They are the 2 Chris’s – Chris Hood and Chris Pollitt;
Guy Peters; and Rod Rhodes. With Chris Pollitt way out in front……Here’s a sense of how he has been writing in recent years -

There
have been many failures in the history of public management reform – even in
what might be thought of as the best‐equipped countries.

Six of the most common seems to have been:

·Prescription before
diagnosis. No good doctor would ever do this, but politicians,
civil servants and management consultants do it frequently. A proper
diagnosis means much more than just having a general impression of inefficiency
or ineffectiveness (or whatever). It means a thorough analysis of
what mechanisms, processes and attitudes are producing the undesirable features
of the status quo and an identification of how these mechanisms can be altered
or replaced. Such an analysis constitutes a model of the
problem. This kind of modelling is probably far more useful to
practical reformers than the highly abstract discussions of alternative models
of governance with which some academics have been more concerned (e.g. Osborne,
2010). [For a full exposition of this realist approach to
programme logic, see Pawson, 2013. For an explanation of why very
general models of governance, are of limited value in practical analysis see
Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, pp11‐25 and 208‐221]

·Failure to build a
sufficient coalition for reform, so that the reform is seen as just the project
of a small elite. This is particularly dangerous in countries
where governments change rapidly, as in some parts of the CEE. Once
a government falls or an elite is ousted, the reform has no roots and dies.

· Launching reforms without ensuring sufficient
implementation capacity. For example, it is very risky to
launch a programme of contracting out public services unless and until there
exists a cadre of civil servants who are trained and skilled in contract
design, negotiation and monitoring. Equally, it is dangerous to impose a
sophisticated performance management regime upon an organization which has
little or no previous experience of performance
measurement. And it is also hazardous to run down the
government’s in‐house IT
capacity 6 and rely too much on external expertise (Dunleavy et al,
2006). In each of these cases in‐ house capacity
can be improved, but not overnight.

·Haste and lack of
sustained application. Most major management reforms take years
fully to be implemented. Laws must be passed, regulations rewritten, staff re‐trained, new
organizational structures set up, appointments made, new procedures run and
refined, and so on. This extended implementation may seem
frustrating to politicians who want action (or at least announcements) now, but
without proper preparation reforms will more likely fail. Endless
reforms or ’continuous revolution’ is not a recipe for a well‐functioning
administration

·Over‐reliance
on external experts rather than experienced locals.As management
reform has become an international business, international bodies such as the
OECD or the major management consultancies have become major players. A
fashion has developed in some countries to ’call in the external experts’, as
both a badge of legitimacy and a quick way of accessing international ’best
practice’ Equally, there is perhaps a tendency to
ignore local, less clearly articulated knowledge and experience. Yet
the locals usually know much more about contextual factors than the visiting
(and temporary) experts. .

· Ignoring local cultural factors. For example, a
reform that will work in a relatively high trust and low corruption culture
such as, say, Denmark’s, is far less likely to succeed in a low trust/higher
corruption environment such as prevails in, say, some parts of the Italian
public sector. In the EU there are quite large cultural variations
between different countries and sectors……………

I would suggest a number of
‘lessons’ which could be drawn from the foregoing analysis:

1.Big models, such
as NPM or ‘good governance’ or ‘partnership working’, often do not take one
very far. The art of reform lies in their adaptation (often very extensive) to
fit local contexts. And anyway,
these models are seldom entirely well-defined or consistent in themselves. Applying the big models or even standardized
techniques (benchmarking, business process re-engineering, lean) in a
formulaic, tick-box manner can be highly counterproductive.

2.As many scholars
and some practitioners have been observing for decades, there is no ‘one best
way’. The whole exercise of reform
should begin with a careful diagnosis of the local situation, not with the
proclamation of a model (or technique) which is to be applied, top down. ‘No prescription without careful diagnosis’
is not a bad motto for reformers.

3.Another, related
point is that task differences really do matter. A market-type mechanism may work quite well when
applied to refuse collection but not when applied to hospital care. Sectoral and task differences are important,
and reformers should be wary of situations where their advisory team lacks
substantial expertise in the particular tasks and activities that are the
targets for reform.

4.Public Management
Reform (PMR) is always political as well as managerial/organizational. Any prescription or diagnosis which does not
take into account the ‘way politics works around here’ is inadequate and
incomplete. Some kernel of active
support from among the political elite is usually indispensable.

5.PMR is usually
saturated with vested interests, including those of the consultants/advisors,
and the existing public service staff.
To conceptualise it as a purely technical exercise would be naïve.

6.Successful PMR
is frequently an iterative exercise, over considerable periods of time. Reformers must adapt and also take advantage
of ‘windows of opportunity’. This
implies a locally knowledgable presence over time, not a one-shot ‘quick fix’
by visiting consultants.

7.It does work
sometimes! But, as indicated at the
outset, humility is not a bad starting point.

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.